Larry Cuban, a professor emeritus of education at Stanford University, says some of the public’s negative views come from frequent criticism from policymakers and in news reports.

“It’s become a throwaway line: ‘Oh, sure U.S. schools are lousy,’” said Cuban. “I think we have schizophrenia in the U.S. that we believe all U.S. schools are lousy except the schools we send our kids to.”

Thirty years of intensive marketing bank-rolled by the richest families in America has paid off in a general sense. Much like the denizens of the Scooter Store Revolution collecting government assistance while demonstrating against government assistance for an amorphous group of ‘others’ sucking on the entitlement tit, Americans are all for punishing lazy teachers working in predominantly urban areas far from their comfortable suburban oases but seem quite satisfied with their teachers and schools.

Second, while I can’t speak for big urban districts like Chicago and NYC, the whole issue is a bunch of horse manure. You show me a lazy, good-for-nothing teacher [and they're out there... I've worked with them] working in a school and I’ll show you an administrator who is failing to do his/her job. For the majority of school districts, there are procedures in place for getting rid of dead weight. What unions offer teachers is the right to due process and that is it. Living in the South I’ve witnessed many occasions in which due process saved teachers [usually biology teachers] from the pre-Enlightenment influence of local churches intent on ensuring children do not learn the basic knowledge informing many of the medical procedures keeping church elders alive to do God’s work.

Perhaps the most important take away from all of this is that the long term strategy of the elite in creating politicized think tanks, policy centers, and foundations to ’shape’ the body politic to their benefit are now reaping the rewards of their investments. The commonsensical ‘center’ of American politics has now shifted so far to the right that the public commons is now being offered up to the highest bidder in the name of liberty and equality.

If you want to understand where public education reform is heading, look south and east to Florida, where the governor-elect, Rick Scott, is talking about a new funding student formula that is more likely to destroy the public school system than accomplish anything else.

Scott wants to expand a voucher program that allows low-income and disabled students to use public money to go to private schools to ALL students…

Once upon a time in America, it may have sounded preposterous not only in concept but in chances of implementation.

But the Republicans in Florida, who just tightened their control in the state capital in the last election, are making in clear that they are determined to push for such a system in the state legislature next year.

There are legal, constitutional and other hurdles, but in today’s political and education atmosphere, no bad idea is impossible to implement.

That Rick Scott is a veteran of the largest Medicare fraud scheme in US history speaks volumes as to how dysfunctional our political system has become, but that he is now poised to set up yet another form of public looting in a legalized form should give everyone pause before blindly accepting the entreaties of public education reformers like Scott’s new useful tool Michelle Rhee.

Ultimately, the rot at the core of our political structure will break the American system that emerged from the upheavals of early 20th century, and this kleptocratic ’success’ is made possible by the common sense understandings that have been under construction for the past 3 decades. From Rush Limbaugh to the Op-Ed page of the Washington Post, the individuals who make up the American body politic have been conditioned to see themselves as atomistic entities who will achieve ‘liberty’ only through the rejection of social action and community.

Social Darwinism and the “life is like the jungle” attitude that are so pervasive in our society have a single purpose: to convince you that you are an antelope. The only thing you can do is run away. You’ll be OK so long as there are other people around who are even more vulnerable. You could try to stop them, but why? Every time they eat the poor, the geezers, and the kids who are defenseless, you live another day. Don’t try holding your ground against the big, strong predator. Don’t stick together or they’ll eat all of you.

Just imagine how much different our politics and society would be if we were less eager to say “As long as they’re eating someone else, I don’t care” and more apt to get in a big group and ask the lion if it feels lucky.

I’ve taught at all levels of our education system, and the one thing that I’ve learned from those experiences is that even our so-called ‘good students’ are usually anything but… In the upper reaches of the academy, for example, the ‘good students’ that I’ve encountered are generally [but not always] the ones who know how to play the game, and their primary goal is to find out what the professor is looking for and provide it to him/her with as little effort as is possible. Despite all of the high and mighty rhetoric often thrown around about education, the pursuit of academic degrees is now almost totally subsumed beneath an instrumental logic that renders a good deal of what passes for schooling down to performance ritual.

This blast of cynicism was sparked by this article in the Chronicle of Higher Education that details the confessions of an academic mercenary who writes papers for students at all levels and who spells out in not so subtle language that we are producing crop after crop of college graduates who cannot organize their thoughts into anything resembling coherence let alone write an academic paper. As a Sociology instructor, I am constantly faced with the question: Is it my job to not only teach my content area but to also teach the 100+ students I work with every semester how to organize and write a paper?

In the past year, I’ve written roughly 5,000 pages of scholarly literature, most on very tight deadlines. But you won’t find my name on a single paper.

‘ve written toward a master’s degree in cognitive psychology, a Ph.D. in sociology, and a handful of postgraduate credits in international diplomacy. I’ve worked on bachelor’s degrees in hospitality, business administration, and accounting. I’ve written for courses in history, cinema, labor relations, pharmacology, theology, sports management, maritime security, airline services, sustainability, municipal budgeting, marketing, philosophy, ethics, Eastern religion, postmodern architecture, anthropology, literature, and public administration. I’ve attended three dozen online universities. I’ve completed 12 graduate theses of 50 pages or more. All for someone else.

You’ve never heard of me, but there’s a good chance that you’ve read some of my work. I’m a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary. My customers are your students. I promise you that. Somebody in your classroom uses a service that you can’t detect, that you can’t defend against, that you may not even know exists…

You would be amazed by the incompetence of your students’ writing. I have seen the word “desperate” misspelled every way you can imagine. And these students truly are desperate. They couldn’t write a convincing grocery list, yet they are in graduate school. They really need help. They need help learning and, separately, they need help passing their courses. But they aren’t getting it.

For those of you who have ever mentored a student through the writing of a dissertation, served on a thesis-review committee, or guided a graduate student through a formal research process, I have a question: Do you ever wonder how a student who struggles to formulate complete sentences in conversation manages to produce marginally competent research? How does that student get by you? [...]

It is late in the semester when the business student contacts me, a time when I typically juggle deadlines and push out 20 to 40 pages a day. I had written a short research proposal for her a few weeks before, suggesting a project that connected a surge of unethical business practices to the patterns of trade liberalization. The proposal was approved, and now I had six days to complete the assignment. This was not quite a rush order, which we get top dollar to write. This assignment would be priced at a standard $2,000, half of which goes in my pocket.

A few hours after I had agreed to write the paper, I received the following e-mail: “sending sorces for ur to use thanx.”

I did not reply immediately. One hour later, I received another message:

“did u get the sorce I send

please where you are now?

Desprit to pass spring projict”

Not only was this student going to be a constant thorn in my side, but she also communicated in haiku, each less decipherable than the one before it. I let her know that I was giving her work the utmost attention, that I had received her sources, and that I would be in touch if I had any questions. Then I put it aside.

Today, we find ourselves being bombarded yet again with the discourse of crisis by a well-financed group of intrepid reformers pushing, this time, a corporatist agenda of quasi-privatization and high-stakes assessment. But what is the nature of this new “crisis”? And is it real or manufactured? I would argue that we are indeed in a period of crisis, but the nature of that crisis bears little resemblence to the discourse of “crisis” dominating today’s public debate. In fact, I’d argue that the real crisis facing public schooling is to be found in the purveyors of this new discourse of “crisis” and reform. I’ll be returning to the nature of this new era of “crisis” in the coming weeks, but I’d like to start off the conversation by pointing toward Tom Hoffman’s place. Look’s like Tom beat me to the punch, and he has done so in a thoughtful and concise manner…

Compared to other reasonably prosperous and developed countries on internationally administered tests, aggregate US results are middling. However, compared to other countries, the US primary and secondary education system is highly decentralized, segregated, inequitably funded and operates within the context of high and growing income inequality.

When individual states like Massachusetts, Vermont and New Hampshire are compared to other countries, they rank near the top. To the extent that students in high income districts can be compared to other countries, they compare well, too.

While Singapore and Finland, exotic locales to most Americans, are the most cited examples of high performing countries, Canada is also consistently at the top. The most straightforward and accessible education reform lesson derived from international comparisons for Americans would be to become more like Canada.

There is not so much a crisis as a chronic problem of educating poor and minority youth in America, particularly concentrated in segregated schools. There is no existing model in the world for doing this right: nobody has overcome our level of income inequality, inadequate access to health care, high level of incarceration, etc. No other country of comparable wealth considers these conditions tolerable, no other country’s schools successfully dig a sub-set of their students out of such a deep hole.

Do read on…

The marriage of low-cost netbooks and open-source technologies to create 1-to-1 computing programs is a relatively new development. Open-source technologies, which evolve when individuals voluntarily contribute their creativity and knowledge to online networks of innovation, were once thought to be too free-wheeling and untested for schools. But that is now changing as schools look for more creative and cost-effective ways to use technology.

“[Open source has] finally gained enough notoriety that people are starting to take a look at it,” says Randy Orwin, a school technology consultant at Orwin Consulting in Seattle who specializes in introducing new technologies into schools…

One of the pioneers of marrying netbooks and open-source tools is Jim Klein, the director of information services and technology for the 11,000-student Saugus Union School District in Santa Clarita Valley, Calif. Through extensive planning and documentation, Klein learned how to execute a successful Linux-based netbook program. When he launched a 1,700-netbook program two years ago, his goal was to have seamless and efficient implementation that would not require additional support staffing.Now, Klein wants to help others establish similar programs. He designed a system that makes it possible for anyone—tech directors, principals, and teachers—to replicate his 1-to-1 program without having to start from scratch. He developed a template of sorts that makes it possible for schools to set up netbooks for the classroom.

The Web tool he created and offers for free allows people to download a complete package of education-oriented applications and software programs onto a USB flash drive. The package is based on an open-source operating system called Ubuntu—a variation of Linux that is specifically designed for netbooks. While less than four gigabytes in size, Klein’s mix provides more than 50 free educational applications and tools, including OpenOffice Word and Spreadsheet, Firefox and Google Chrome browsers, Gimp and TuxPaint graphics design, Tux Math and Multiplication Puzzle games, Virtual Microscope, KWordQuiz, Audacity audio editor, and RhythmBox Music.

It was that mix that enabled history and technology teacher Scott to implement his school’s netbook program just four months after suggesting the idea to the district’s superintendent.

Click here to view the embedded video.

For parents, their well-justified concerns about their children’s education leads many middle-class parents possessing the necessary cultural capital to think strategically about when to enroll their children in Kindergarten. NYTimes…

AFTER all those attentive early childhood rituals — the flashcards, the Kumon, the Dora the Explorer, the mornings spent in cutting-edge playgrounds — who wouldn’t want to give their children a head start when it’s finally time to set off for school?

Suzanne Collier, for one. Rather than send her 5-year-old son, John, to kindergarten this year, the 36-year-old mother from Brea, Calif., enrolled him in a “transitional” kindergarten “without all the rigor.” He’s an active child, Ms. Collier said, “and not quite ready to focus on a full day of classroom work.” Citing a study from “The Tipping Point” about Canadian hockey players, which found that the strongest players were the oldest, she said, “If he’s older, he’ll have the strongest chance to do the best.”

Hers is a popular school of thought, and it is not new. “Redshirting” of kindergartners — the term comes from the practice of postponing the participation of college athletes in competitive games — became increasingly widespread in the 1990s, and shows no signs of waning.

In 2008, the most recent year for which census data is available, 17 percent of children were 6 or older when they entered the kindergarten classroom. Sand tables have been replaced by worksheets to a degree that’s surprising even by the standards of a decade ago. Blame it on No Child Left Behind and the race to get children test-ready by third grade: Kindergarten has steadily become, as many educators put it, “the new first grade.”

First off, as the classically trained economists like to say, incentives matter. Parents with the where-with-all and the means to delay the enrollment of their children in Kindergarten will do so if that means they get a leg up on both academic development and maturation, and their ability to do so only confirms the sad reality that American education is a two-tiered system. However, that is not the point which I would like to focus on today. Instead, I would like to make what might appear to be a radical proposal to some.

While the mantra for the past hundred years of education policy has consistently called for more schooling, I would like to make an argument for less schooling. In Nordic countries, such as Finland, formal schooling begins at the age of 7 for a total of 9 years of mandatory education, although the majority of students continue on for two more years as preparation for technical school or the academy. My proposal is to follow this model, and I will justify this proposal following two lines of argument… one pedagogical the other financial.

First off, it is well-established that human cognitive and emotional development is not uniform nor does it follow a neat schedule that can be tracked by the calendar year. The assumption of policy-makers and specialists is that today’s new crop of Kindergarten students should walk in the door with, at the very least, the rudimentary skills of reading in hand, but this assumption is one built on a factory-model of schooling that bears no resemblance to the course of actual human development. I would argue that the primary mission of pre-school and day-care from day one to the age of 6 should be summed up with one word: play. Provide pre-schoolers with cognitively rich environments in which to explore, play, and imagine in collaboration with nurturing adults and mixed-age groupings of other children. Academic instruction as we adults envision it should be totally absent; formal instruction should begin at age 7. This would provide quite a few benefits… I’ll mention two here.

First, it would help to ensure that the students walking in the door the first day of school would have had two more years to mature and develop the necessary skills for reading and mathematics through play. For sure, some students would walk in the door already reading and writing but for those who mature more slowly those extra years would provide them with the time they need to develop the necessary skills required for literacy. Second, the idea that 5 and 6 year-olds are ready to spend the majority of their time sitting still behind a table or desk is simply mad. While 7 year-olds aren’t known for their low energy, those added years of maturation does provide them with a greater ability to attend to more formal instructional tasks, and their cognitive development provides them with more opportunities to make connections with the material they’re learning and to construct more advanced cognitive frameworks for future learning.

Turning to school finances, the savings involved with eliminating two years of formal schooling would be significant. Those resources could be re-directed toward practices that are proven to work, such as lower class sizes in elementary schooling. In the age of austerity, it is clear that resources for research-based education reform will not be forthcoming, so I would argue that instead of trying to expand schooling with limited resources [that results in the expansion of inadequate educational practices] let’s focus on getting more bang for our buck. I advocate that we use resources currently being dedicated to Kindergarten and the first grade to the expansion of small, neighborhood elementary schools with low student-teacher ratios and cohesive class structures that work with the same teacher throughout the elementary years. In short, I would argue that we should re-focus our resources not on more schooling but on better schooling.

Obviously, the blog format is not the best medium for fleshing out all of the particulars involved with a policy proposal such as this, and there are certain issues, such as child care, that are not addressed here. However, my intent here is to begin the process of re-thinking the way we educate our children and to work out my thoughts by writing about them… I’ll be coming back to this idea again…

The bill [Tennessee First to the Top Act of 2010. (SB 7005 )] passed by the state legislature and signed by Bredesen, authorizes the commissioner [of education] to contract with any person, governmental entity, or nonprofit entity (managing entity) to manage the day to day operations of any or all schools or LEAs in the district including providing direct services to students. A managing entity may apply to the commissioner for a waiver of any state board of education rule that inhibits or hinders the ability of the school or LEA to achieve the required adequate yearly progress benchmarks.

Tennessee has partnered with Louisiana in applying for and receiving a $30 million grant to “expand the charter model implemented in New Orleans to the lowest performing schools in New Orleans and Tennessee, particularly in Memphis and Nashville. The consortium aims to turn around the bottom five percent of failing schools by establishing successful charters that have a track record of boosting academic achievement in challenging school environments.”

Note the waiver section that I’ve highlighted above. I wonder what kind of rules the Gates Foundation public intellectuals in the state house have in mind…

I’m beginning a new research project on KIPP schools while I get some much needed R&R on the beach. I had anticipated having to travel to Nashville, New Orleans, or D.C. to conduct observations, but it might turn out that I can do some of the observations here in my home town. Oh joy!

Regular posting will resume next week…

To gather newer data on the impact of teacher credentials and characteristics on high school students’ achievement, Ladd and her research partners took a look at scores from the end-of-course exams that all high school students are required to take in North Carolina. They looked in particular at statewide data for four cohorts of 9th and 10th graders for whom they could find and match up data on their teachers. (The final sample included tens of thousands of students.)The bottom line, the researchers found, was that at the high school level, most measurable teacher credentials do indeed matter. And they have a large enough impact on student achievement, Ladd and her colleagues say, to suggest that they ought to figure into policymakers’ decisions on how to raise the quality of instruction in schools.

In keeping with previous studies on teacher quality, the North Carolina data show that teaching experience matters—up to a point. After five years on the job, another year of experience didn’t seem to make that much more difference. The researchers also found that teachers who had graduated from more-selective colleges spurred bigger learning gains in students than those from less-selective schools.

With regard to master’s degrees, the researchers’ findings were a bit more nuanced. Teachers who had earned a master’s degree before entering the field were no more effective than those without master’s degrees. But teachers who got a master’s degree after they began teaching were found to do a better job at boosting students’ test scores than did their less-educated teaching peers.

Getting a high score on the subject-matter tests that teachers take for certification also was linked to greater student learning gains—especially in algebra and geometry. Likewise, teachers who were certified in the subject they taught were found to be more effective than those who were not.

The study also found that teachers with a “lateral”—or alternative—license were slightly less effective than teachers with traditional teaching licenses.

Beyond the fact that we should abandon funding efforts for alternative licensure programs, two policy implications jump out at me… First, new teachers should be required to work in a school for a couple of years prior to completing their Master’s level work. It would appear that Master’s level work makes a better contribution to professional development when the student has had some experience in a classroom. Second, the absence of evidence that experience beyond the five year mark contributes positively to student learning would appear to speak to a need for more professional development opportunities or may be the result of structural limits beyond which experience is incapable of making a difference. Hard to tell…

[UPDATE] Chad Aldeman over at the Quick and the Ed thinks that providing teacher candidates six weeks of TFA training in which to practice their “craft” [not profession] is just dandy and wonders if school districts are doing this. Boggles the mind. Is it possible that a “professional” education blogger is so out of touch with traditional methods of teacher training that he is unaware that most university-based teacher training programs require candidates to complete a year-long internship? [UPDATE II: I've removed the snark per conversation with Mr. Aldeman.]

RALEIGH, N.C. – In the annals of desegregation, Raleigh is barely a footnote.

Integration came relatively peacefully to the North Carolina capital. There was no “stand in the schoolhouse door,” no need of National Guard escorts or even a federal court order.

Nearly 50 years passed — mostly uneventfully, at least until a new school board majority was elected last year on a platform supporting community schools.

The result has been turmoil…

With 140,000 students in 160 schools, Wake County was the largest of about 70 districts across the nation using socio-economic status to maintain diversity. The system was considered a model for those looking for a way around race-based assignment scheme rejected by the courts.

“It (the Wake County system) really was a beacon, a flag around which more and more people were rallying as they saw the positive effects of this,” says sociologist Gerald Grant, a professor emeritus at Syracuse University and author of the book “Hope and Despair in the American City: Why There are No Bad Schools in Raleigh.” [...]

Part of the story is that Wake County is increasingly populated by people who did not grow up here and do not feel the tug or burden of that history. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, about half of Wake County’s residents were born outside North Carolina.

“The population shift is HUGE,” says Grant, who briefly taught at a Raleigh high school while researching his book. “You had folks moving down there from Lexington, Mass., and buying a $275,000 house, and they thought a white school came with it. But when they got down there, they found their kids were getting on a bus.”

At a recent conference at North Carolina State University, Grant jokingly told supporters of the diversity policy that their biggest mistake was that they “didn’t build the gates on all the roads leading to Raleigh to keep all those damn Yankees out of here” — people like New York native Tedesco, one of four new board members chosen in an election last fall that saw just 8 percent turnout.

“They were well coordinated, well funded,” says Grant. “They got their message out, and they gathered the discontented.”

Immediately after taking office, the new 5-4 majority began dismantling the old diversity plan. The response was equally immediate. In February, Superintendent Del Burns — who started as a special education teacher in 1976 and had led the district since 2006 — resigned.

“It is clear to me that I cannot, in all good conscience, continue to serve,” he said.